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Vice President J.D. Vance dismissed podcaster and longtime Trump supporter-turned-critic Joe Rogan’s claim that MAGA supporters are “dorks.”
On Saturday’s episode of “The Benny Show,” conservative commentator Benny Johnson asked Vance to respond to Rogan’s remarks, in which the former “Fear Factor” host labeled MAGA supporters “uninteresting, unintelligent people” and “dorks.”
Vance laughed off the characterization, reinforcing his support for the movement’s base while rejecting Rogan’s critique.
“I think we have many, many fewer dorks than the far left, but everybody’s got some dorks,” Vance said. “We love our dorks. We love our cool kids. We love anybody who wants to save the country.”
The response comes after Rogan stated Thursday on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which is the most listened to podcast in the U.S., according to Spotify, that MAGA has lost its focus.
JD Vance hit back at Joe Rogan calling MAGA voters ‘dorks,’ telling Benny Johnson, ‘I think we have many, many fewer dorks than the far left’ (YouTube/Benny Johnson)
“That phrase sucks … Make America Great Again, and then it becomes a movement of a bunch of f**king dorks because a lot of them are dorks,” he said.
“A lot of them are these really weird, f**king uninteresting, unintelligent people that have got something they cling to, and there’s a lot of people that are just real genuine patriots, and they’re all lumped into this one group, and you got to accept the dorks, too? F** that.”
Rogan, who initially endorsed Trump in the 2024 election, began distancing himself from the president late last year. Rather than fully backing Trump’s policies, he started publicly challenging key aspects of the administration’s agenda, including immigration enforcement, the war with Iran, and the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
He specifically criticized the aggressiveness of immigration raids, saying they often targeted people without serious criminal records and called the situation more complex than simply rounding up migrants. Rogan even questioned whether the U.S. was becoming overly militarized in its enforcement tactics.
On last week’s podcast, Rogan criticized Trump’s military actions against Iran.
“It just seems so insane based on what he ran on,” Rogan told independent journalist Michael Shellenberger on his March 17 show. “I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on ‘No more wars, end these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”
Back on “The Benny Show,” Vance fired back at Rogan after he claimed that former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were “better at deporting illegals” than Trump.
“Joe is wrong on this. I’m going to text Joe, because that is definitely wrong,” Vance told Johnson.
